Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
1932 · Mervyn LeRoy · I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang on Sightlines
A man backs away from a woman on a dark street. She has asked him how he lives. He whispers the answer, and as he says it the light is going off him: the body first, then everything but the face, then the face. “I steal.” The frame holds a moment on nothing. Warner Bros. ended a studio picture by taking its leading man out of the visible world.
The story goes that the blackness was a lighting failure Mervyn LeRoy and Sol Polito noticed and kept — a well-attested anecdote rather than settled fact, and worth repeating, because keeping it took the instinct the whole film runs on. This picture had been about subtraction since the first reel, which opens on a decorated veteran who means to be an architect. Here was subtraction, free, in the lamps.
Between that medal and that darkness sits one of the fastest hours in early sound cinema, and the speed is not decoration. It is the argument.
Deleuze gave ordinary working cinema a name, the movement-image, and described its engine plainly: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. In its grandest version, the large form, a whole encompassing world presses down until one decisive act transforms it. Fugitive builds that form with textbook confidence. The encompassing world is the chain gang, and the film makes it an actual machine rather than a metaphor: sledgehammers swung in time, the roll call of shackled men, guards’ barked commands, the scrape of chain. Sound is doing the encompassing. There is almost no score. The camp is a rhythm section, and William Holmes cuts to it, so the sense that the thing grinds forward regardless is never asserted. It is heard.
Then Allen performs the decisive act. He escapes. And the situation does not transform.
This is where the lens earns its keep, because “the system destroyed him” is a theme, available to anyone, while Deleuze is describing a grammar. The action-image wants a duel, force against force. Put a hero opposite a villain and one of them changes. Put a hero opposite an institution and the duel is rigged at the level of form, since an institution can absorb any number of decisive acts without altering. Watch what the script does with that. Allen escapes, rises in the construction trade, and a landlady who learns his secret marries him with it. He is hauled back by an official promise of pardon, which breaks. Every act he takes is real, and every one is metabolized.
What the milieu leaves on him Deleuze calls the imprint, the mutual stamping of situation and character. The stripes, the shackles, the sweatbox. The imprint here is a criminal, and the film is unusually clear that this is a product: the state manufactured the fugitive. The medal in the first reel and the whisper in the last are two ends of one industrial process.
Underneath the legal world there is another one. Writing about naturalism in Stroheim and Buñuel, Deleuze separates the derived milieu, the setting as it presents itself, from the originary world it covers, a place of raw drive and appetite. The chain gang is a penal institution on paper. Polito photographs it as heat, exposed bodies, and the pleasure certain men take in holding a hammer over other men. The flatness is essential. Shot as melodrama it would be an outrage; shot as reportage it is a fact, which is worse. And the gang gets photographed as one body with many hammers, a crowd rendered as a single feeling. Deleuze calls that a dividual, and Fugitive inherits the grammar for it from The Big House.
The predatory marriage belongs to the same world. In naturalism an act reads as the symptom of a drive, and her blackmail is the camp’s appetite relocated to a parlor, where it turns out to be the better prison. Naturalism also has a shape, which Deleuze calls a line of slope: an irreversible descent. Holmes’s montages compress years of Allen’s life precisely so that you stop watching events and start feeling gradient. Medal to “I steal,” downhill, no landings.
And then the light changes. For the escape and the fugitive years Polito switches to the German chiaroscuro Sunrise had imported, where shadow is not absence but a force with its own appetite. By the last scene it has the run of the frame. Note what that dark is, exactly. Deleuze distinguishes the out-of-field that is merely next door, a room you could walk to, from an absolute one, a beyond with no location in space. Allen does not exit into an adjacent street. He exits somewhere unplaceable, the film declines to say where, and the last thing it does is let a voice come out of it.
That should stop you, because it does not belong to 1932. Deleuze dated the crisis of the action-image to postwar Italy, when characters could no longer act adequately on what they saw and cinema learned to watch instead. Fugitive is not that film. It is fast, functional, a movement-image in perfect health. But its final scene contains no available action. Only retreat, a whisper, and the removal of light. The circuit doesn’t break. It runs at full power and delivers nothing, which is a stranger and lonelier result, and one American cinema would take a decade and more to face head-on.
It leaves the problem open on purpose, too. Warner never names the state, a hedge against libel and extradition that has the side effect of making the accusation portable. The film poses a question about a practice still operating while audiences watched, and offers no verdict. Deleuze has a term for an image that poses a discourse it cannot resolve. Hollywood convention had one as well: unreleasable. It was released anyway, and Muni was nominated for it.
Be precise about the realism, though. Bazin would later locate cinema’s truth in duration and ambiguity, the long take that lets the world stay uncertain. Fugitive claims truth the opposite way, through velocity and documentation: Robert Elliott Burns’s memoir, a Georgia named in all but name, a sound system that can register hammer on stone. Journalism, not contemplation. Both are realisms, and they are not the same one.
The debts are visible. LeRoy brought from his own Little Caesar a rise-and-fall ending in destruction rather than redemption, and the momentum to get there. The Public Enemy supplied the premise that an environment manufactures its criminals. The Crowd gave the anonymous man in the machine and the refusal of uplift. Greed gave economic fate with no moral exit. The Big House gave the lockstep and the clang. Sunrise gave the shadow that swallows a final frame. Forward, the inheritance is that ending, one of the most quoted in American sound film, which means it stopped being an ending and became an option: a picture could now dispose of its protagonist by withdrawing him from view instead of judging him.
Watch it again for the light rather than the plot, which you already know. Count the seconds of the last shot. Then ask who the final line is spoken to. She is standing right there, but the light has already left him, and the confession arrives out of the dark, aimed at whoever is still sitting in it.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The chain-gang world presses on Allen until one decisive act — the escape — is staged as the transformation of the situation; Holmes's propulsive cutting drives imprisonment, escape, rise and re-arrest forward with almost no fat. The form is executed perfectly and the situation still does not change.
- the encompasser — The camp as encompassing milieu built out of sound and rhythm: hammers on stone timed to labor, the rattle of chains, the roll call of shackled men, guards' barked commands, with sparse non-diegetic score so the environment itself does the pressing.
- binomial — Force against force where the opposing force is an institution rather than a villain: 'every time Allen earns a legitimate second chance, an institution — the penal system, the state, a coercive marriage, a broken official promise of pardon — hauls him back.'
- empreinte — Props and costume do the stamping — striped uniform, shackles, sweatbox, and the veteran's medal that opens the film — culminating in the dossier's claim that 'the state, not the man, has manufactured the fugitive.'
- originary-world — Polito's documentary flatness on the gang — sweating bodies, sledgehammers, striped uniforms in harsh sun, the sweatbox — reveals the penal institution as a world of heat, appetite and brute force beneath the legal surface; labor staged 'as spectacle and punishment.'
- dividual — The convicts filmed as a single affective unit: 'the rhythmic collective swing of hammers, the roll-call of shackled men' — a grammar of regimented mass movement inherited from The Big House (1930).
- symptom — The predatory landlady-turned-wife 'who traps Allen in a second imprisonment of blackmail and domesticity' — her act reads as the appetite of the camp transposed into a parlor.
- entropy / degradation — The arc from the opening medal to the whispered 'I steal,' with the screenplay's refusal of 'the redemptive arc that Hollywood convention would demand'; the montage sequences compress years so the descent registers as gradient rather than incident. Greed (1924) is the named naturalist ancestor.
- expressionism — Polito 'shifts to expressionistic shadow for the escape and fugitive passages,' the imported German chiaroscuro of Sunrise (1927), ending with the light draining off Muni until only the face remains, then nothing.
- out-of-field-absolute — The final shot: Allen backs away from his former sweetheart into total blackness that is not an adjacent street or room, and the last line is delivered 'nearly in a whisper out of the dark' from a space the film never locates.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The closing scene offers no available act — only retreat, whisper and the subtraction of light — and the protagonist is 'neither saved nor punished by law but simply erased into criminality and darkness.' The sensory-motor circuit runs at full speed and yields nothing.
- discourse-image — An indictment aimed at 'a specific, real, still-operating practice,' with the state pointedly never named and the ending left 'unresolved': the image poses a problem it declines to resolve and hands it to the audience.